I wasn’t born with the name that all my friends secretly call me, but It’s the name I chose for my real self. I was born a girl, but always looked at my brother wishing that I could be like him. But not his personality, I wanted to be a guy because I hated girly things and I enjoy dressing and looking like a guy. But it got to the point I just wasn’t happy in my own body. It didn’t show what I was inside. It took a lot of tears and fighting to find out that in the end, Im a boy trapped in a girls body. While everyone knew I was a lesbian, no one knows the truth. I try to deny who I am, because my family will never accept me. My mom freaked when she found out I was gay. When she saw my facebook used male pronouns, she nearly had a heart attack. I had to lie to keep her from knowing. I will never transition because hurting my family just to make me happy with myself is just something I’ve never been able to do. I couldn’t possibly hurt my mom with that, because when she approached me about my facebook, she said that “transgender people were mentally ill and confused and she didn’t want her daughter to feel that way”. It doesn’t help that my grandparents are proud that I’m their only granddaughter. I have denied religion in the belief that all it has done is blind my mom from seeing that being a parent is more about loving your child no matter what they grow up to be or what they’re born as. I know most people will say that I should leave my family if they would accept me for who I am. But I just can’t. I’ll be 19 soon. I’m afraid of the future and what will happen. All I know is that I need to just keep living.